‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘You told me that it was “all gonna come out”. You said, “It’s all coming to an end.”’
Mary looked horrified. Kash was sitting on a stool by the kitchen bench quite near her, measuring the response on her face. She took a bottle of water from the fridge and set it on the counter, turned away from us both.
‘I didn’t say that,’ she said quietly.
‘Yes, you did.’
‘Look, I’m alone here.’ She threw me a hard look, on the edge of snapping. ‘I lost a child. I lost a husband. I say weird things sometimes that I don’t necessarily mean.’
The silence that fell was heavy. I could hear the children whispering beyond the door. I looked at them and they squealed and ran away.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
‘My husband left. He’s up north. Cairns.’
‘I mean to your child,’ I said. ‘You said you –’
‘Brandon overdosed.’ Mary’s gaze was locked on me. ‘It was an accident. He and his friends had been messing around with stuff brought in by the truckers. He was seventeen, child of my first marriage.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said.
‘I don’t have anything else for you.’ Mary shut the fridge door hard, made jars rattle inside it. ‘That’s it. Now, I’ve got things to do here.’
She let us walk ourselves out. The sun seemed somehow closer, more foreboding. I felt I’d disturbed something, shifted a rock off an insect I didn’t recognise, something dangerous. Something better left alone.
Chapter 92
ALL HIS LIFE, Regan had enjoyed ruining beautiful things. It was a strange sort of instinct, an impulse, the same kind of impulse that drove people to fix pictures hanging crookedly on walls or scrub single greasy fingerprints off of otherwise blessedly clean windowpanes. When new toys came into the youth care facility playroom, he’d break them. Shiny and glossy and smelling of plastic, with their bubbly eyes and stupidly grinning mouths, they seemed painfully perfect. He’d pull out a teddy’s eye. Snap off a robot’s arm. Cut a doll’s hair so that it stuck out of the bulbous rubber scalp in ugly tufts. The broken, dirtied things gave him joy. Maybe he felt they were more like him when they were torn and crooked. He was only small. He couldn’t know.
Then he turned his attention to the other boys and girls. It had begun with pretty little Claudia, with her big eyes and golden curls. Claudia would be adopted in a snap. The carers were already talking about it. She was a doll, they said. Regan had snuck in to the kitchen and found a packet of matches. She wasn’t so perfect when he was done with her.
Regan became ‘difficult’. The word was mentioned around him in a lot of different ways between foster families and care workers. He listened to them chattering above him like he wasn’t there. There had been ‘difficulties’ at his last home. He was ‘difficult’ to place because of his ‘difficult’ behaviour. There were other words. Oppositional. Aggressive. Introverted.
Regan was sixteen when he met Sam. He’d been standing by the cake table at one of those pathetic Christmas events the Department of Children’s Services ran every year at the town hall. Sam had been a lanky, pale kid, his limp black hair constantly hanging in his eyes. He was the only other teen at the stupid party. Regan had watched him for a long while, bored, until he saw Sam observing the gorgeous Christmas cake someone had baked for the occasion. Perfect edges. Immaculate red and green icing. Sam had reached out when no one was looking and pushed one of the lollies on the top of the cake until it sank into the soft, spongey interior, leaving a gaping hole in the design. Regan had smiled. Sam had seen it.
Regan had found him. His perfect match.
But as always, it wasn’t long before that perfection was ruined. Soon there would be blood, and screaming. The adult Regan remembered now as he walked down the empty, dark street, his head low, the baseball cap pulled down over his eyes. Everything was so messy now. So dark, so torn. A beautiful and terrifying time, the very streets seemed awash with new life. Regan came around a corner and a group of young women swirled and ebbed around him. Perfume. He felt the muscles of his shoulders knot, the bones grinding in his neck. Marissa. Elle. Rosetta. His girls. His sacrifices to Sam. The women on the street passed him, a glittering flock of birds. There wasn’t time for that now. That part of his life was over.
Regan glanced now and then at the paper in his hand, the numbers on the buildings around him. He reached the pale blue building and looked up to the third-floor windows facing the distant water.
The lights in Harriet Blue’s apartment were on.
Chapter 93
PEOPLE THINK THAT in the Australian desert there’s nowhere to hide. That it makes the perfect hunting ground because for hundreds of kilometres there is no cover. Barren sand oceans, dotted here and there with clumps of thin, dead or dying trees. In truth the desert is full of holes. From where I stood with Kash, Last Chance Valley was almost invisible in the distance, but for a small rise where the rocky rim poked through the horizon. I knew that beyond where we stood, there would be cracks and crevices in the desert, some kilometres deep, reaching far enough down into the earth for a person to disappear into. It’s a treacherous place. A place not to be wandered into on moonless nights. It does make the perfect hunting ground, but not for its barrenness. It’s porous. Full of secrets.
It was here in the depths of the desert that we met the Forensics team. We had spent the day on the ridge, watching Jace Robit’s property.
Two men from the team who had dealt with the burned car at Snale’s house drove up to our spot in the desert now in a dusty four-wheel drive. The moustached one who had looked at me so strangely in Snale’s hallway.
‘I’m Glen. This is Wayne.’ He shook Kash’s hand, ignored me. ‘We just finished up with the vehicle. It’s all here.’ He handed Kash a report.
‘I might need you guys to stick around in the town, just be an extra hand if we need it. Something’s happening tonight at eight,’ Kash explained to them. ‘We’ve got some interesting suspects moving about. Harry and I will be on this group, and we’ll get Snale and some other officers on the town.’
Glen gave me another nasty look. I jutted my chin at him, a challenge.
‘What’s your problem, mate?’
‘Nothin’,’ he said, shrugging.
‘Come on. Out with it.’
He sighed, gave his offsider a look. ‘I know who you are. I was there at your brother’s apartment when they went in after the arrest.’
There was a meaningful silence among the men around me. I felt a weight steadily increasing on my shoulders.
‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘What’s your point?’
‘My point is that I saw the evidence, Detective Blue. The duct tape on the bed. The messy sheets. The video camera. It was sick. I have nightmares about what happened in that apartment. I find it mildly infuriating that you’ve stuck by your brother all this time, that’s all.’
‘Nothing happened in that apartment,’ I said.
‘Maybe we should just –’ Kash said.
‘What’s your explanation, then?’ Glen said. ‘I’ve heard you say your brother is being framed. You must believe he was framed by this guy the police are hunting right now, the shaven-headed guy, the one who abducted Caitlyn McBeal. The guy who told her he was Sam’s partner. So, what, this guy abducts these girls right from under your brother’s nose and savagely murders them and dumps them like pieces of trash. He waits until Sam goes to work and he says, “Ha ha! Now’s my chance to do it again!” He abducts Caitlyn, and he’s all ready to do his nasty business on her, when “Oh, hot damn!” Sam’s been arrested! Shit! Holy moly! This wasn’t in the script!’
‘Mate,’ – Kash stepped forwards, put a hand out – ‘just back down.’